“If They’ve Figured Out Demand Gen, F*** Me.”

David Hayes left The Marketing Practice to build brand, creative and media on top of a demand gen agency. He tells Rich Fitzmaurice why demand gen was always the hard bit, why great clients get great work, and why no AI tool has wowed him yet.

David Hayes moved to Seattle for love. Working in London in his twenties, worn out by agency life and partying too much, he met a woman on holiday in Morocco who had just finished law school in Seattle. Twelve months of long distance later, he decided to move there. Now EVP at Unbound IA, he has a brief from its founder to work out what comes after pure play demand gen.

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Rich: Give me an overview of Unbound. And what does the IA stand for? I couldn't find it anywhere.

David: We left it a little ambiguous on purpose, because we knew it would be the question everyone asks. The IA is a nod to our Indian heritage. For all intents and purposes we're Unbound when we're talking with clients, but India is the heartland of the agency, so it's in respect of that.

Rich: How big is the team, and where are you based?

David: About 250 people globally. Our original office is in Pune, which is about 180 of those people. Ram, the founder, opened Dubai next and moved there, so we've got around five people in Dubai. We opened an office at Liverpool Street this summer with 15 to 20 people across creative and strategy. Then about another 20 across the US. I've got an office in Seattle, but the US team is spread out: Austin, the Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Florida.

We're in our ninth year in business. I joined at the start of February last year, so not quite two years.

Ram originally built Unbound as a pure play demand generation agency. It was all about lead gen, a similar model to a Demand Science or a TechTarget, with a lot of content syndication programmes for clients on a CPL basis.

I met Ram in 2023. I was a partner at The Marketing Practice and starting to plan my next move, and he was interested in what evolving beyond pure play demand gen could look like and what it would take. We talked more at the end of 2024, I joined last year, and he gave me carte blanche to develop the vision for where we take the agency.

What excited me was this. I've been agency side for 20 years, B2B for the last 10 or 15, and demand gen has always been the hardest piece. So I thought, if this agency has figured out how to do demand gen properly, f*** me, adding creative, strategy and media is going to be much easier than going the other way. And it's proving to be pretty true.

We've got our own owned and operated database of around 200 million B2B professionals, with our tech publication, TechResearchOnline, sitting on top of it. That's acting as a secret weapon for a lot of clients. It was conceived as a content syndication platform, essentially like a TechTarget, but we've made the pivot to use it as a market research tool too. When we're planning creative campaigns, we can pull insight on a client's audiences and accounts, and what themes and content they're engaging with. Everyone wants data-backed strategy, don't they, particularly when you're talking about brand.

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Rich: What does your client base look like?

David: Historically Unbound did a lot of business through agencies that white labelled us: Demand Science, Dentsu and others. On the enterprise side we work with AWS, Oracle and SAP. In a lot of those cases that's pure play demand programmes. We do partner marketing programmes with SAP and webinar programmes with AWS.

Since we brought in our creative and strategy practice over the past 18 months, we've also gone down market to work with fast growth scale ups. We've gone as low as Series A, but our sweet spot is the later stage businesses up to around a billion in revenue. They desperately need help getting their brand into shape quickly, revamping their go to market, and doing a lot with a pretty small media budget. Examples would be Acronis in cybersecurity, and Todyl, a US security company that does a lot of work through MSPs.

At the upper end, we're currently Nutanix's creative partner. And one of our best wins this year was Capital One, where we're the B2B agency of record for their new software division.

It's been a fascinating 18 months. It's my first time working at an agency with really low brand awareness, because we're such a new player in the space. When I joined The Marketing Practice, it was already well known and established. POP, my agency before that, was very well known in Seattle with the big Microsofts of the world. So it's been interesting navigating low awareness, particularly when you're trying to win creative brand work. People want credibility and trust that a partner can deliver. All of that work is coming through relationship-based selling, not cold outreach.

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Rich: You've been making a bit of noise this week around a Brand Rewire.

David: One of our big learnings has been keeping our ear to the ground on what clients actually want from agencies. With an existing relationship, it's much easier. We can talk about custom programmes built around their specific needs. But to get the volume and scale we want, and reach broader audiences, clients want specificity. They want to buy a packaged solution.

Brand Rewire and our new Performance ABM programme are both about packaging up more off the shelf solutions. The steps that make up those programmes aren't materially different from the traditional models, but packaging them into fixed price models makes it much easier to explain to clients who don't know Unbound as a brand agency or an ABM agency how we can solve problems for them.

I'd be interested in your take, because it feels like there's a SaaSification of agency services going on. Clients are so used to buying tools now, particularly with AI, that it's like, why should I think about a service-based model with my agency when I could buy a tool that does 80% of what they can do?

Rich: The more chief growth officers and founders I talk to, the more I'm seeing not a trend exactly, but a question. Why are we spending so much money on SaaS tools, and are we now in a position where we can build it ourselves? Take content repositories like Showpad, which get the right sales enablement into the right sales team's hands. The licences can be hefty. Founders are saying, let's look at the best tools on the market and see if we can build our own. Over the last three months that has really rocketed. Whether it's achievable is a completely different matter. I come from a B2B background of focusing on your core purpose and buying the products that would be distracting to build. Focus on your clients and serve them as well as possible.

David: It's a question, isn't it? We're in this AI maturity cycle where lots of individuals and teams have had early wins. They think, I just spun up custom landing pages in Lovable that look brilliant, with no coding experience and no dev team, in an hour. Why do we need the dev team? Then as you do more of it, you hit the limitations. It's not the same code standard. It's not scalable. You can vibe code internal tools to a point where you think, that's pretty impressive. Then it can't do this one thing, you can't get it to, and you have to start again. It's exciting experimentation, but there's also a real risk of wasting a lot of time.

Rich: Right now it's really good for iteration. For clarifying your thoughts and working them through, or bringing your ideas to life so you can show the real experts what was in your head and the direction of travel. But it's scary how many people think a couple of prompts will create something that's actually launchable. They don't know what they don't know. It's a veneer.

David: Application security, data privacy.

Rich: Exactly.

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David: The common theme this year has been executive teams pushing the mandate to use AI. Lots of my clients have made big layoffs this past year, all in service of investing in data centres and AI productivity. And yet a lot of those executives aren't applying themselves to AI. They're not putting the time in. It's easy to say you guys need to be using it without it changing your own time commitment. Is that a US thing, or are you feeling it over there too?

Rich: That's very much the key soundbite, that we must be using AI. But I think of it as elasticated. It's going to snap back, and the question is how fast. AI has been used as an excuse to slow down hiring, and to raise a valid question on behalf of shareholders about whether AI should be doing this. Some companies have used it as an excuse to downsize and let people go. It's a very easy excuse to make.

From a marketing point of view, the traditional skills are still valued. Some companies are just finding they need fewer of them. Content and communications is a good example. People can draft so much quicker, with access to a knowledge base of the press releases, white papers and thought leadership they've produced in the past. The clever companies still need individual experts, because AI cannot write. It can draft, but it cannot write to the quality of the best comms people at this moment in time. You just don't need as many of them as you did as recently as a year or 18 months ago.

I do think AI can make average marketers worse. But it can make good marketers really good. It's the right tools in the right hands. I know some really good campaign people who can get to the creative angles, what it could look like and the possible messaging trees in a couple of days rather than weeks. But it still takes the traditional methodology to get it to a place where you'd take it to an exec.

David: I've seen some awful examples this year where the CMO has gone it alone because they've felt empowered. They think, I'm going to give it a go and see if I can come up with this campaign. They think it's brilliant, take it to the team, and the team says it's terrible. Or they've already taken it to the board, and the board says it's terrible. We've had a few RFPs come our way like that.

Rich: Marketers aren't just the ones using all this AI. They're the victims as well. I know many stories of founders, COOs and chiefs of staff having conversations with AI assistants, or playing with a tool that was promoted to them on Instagram. They generate articles and blogs and farm them to the marketing team saying we should publish this. Or they create a corporate video and say, look what I've made, let's post it on social. That creates a very awkward situation. Marketing teams are used to stakeholders telling them what's wrong and sharing their personal opinions. Now they have those stakeholders creating something and then insisting it gets used.

David: It's coming up a lot in ABM too. Five years ago a lot of people were starting their ABM journeys, and there's always been that tension of whether sales actually uses what marketing puts together. This year, sales has felt super empowered to go and make what they need to take into their accounts. You see some travesties, people feeling really good about a custom video they've made for an account.

It's fantastic that people feel more creative and empowered. But it puts marketing in a really difficult position. What role are we really playing? How is our discipline being respected? It feels like there's a broader reckoning coming over how we define the marketing function and what purpose it serves in relation to sales. My chief creative officer always says brand is infrastructure. Everything within your business is brand. That holds right down to an ABM level.

Rich: There's a clamour at the moment for AEO and appearing in AI search results, and a clamour for AI-facilitated written content. One of the problems of the internet era is the sheer amount of noise your prospects have to wade through to get to you. I'm hoping that because of that noise, that mess, over the next year we see big investment in brand and true creativity. Anyone can create AI slop written content. People can easily create bad videos. It's the modern version of Shutterstock footage. If everyone is adapting to these new hygiene factors, the only way to cut through is true creativity and true brand building.

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David: It's a fascinating time. Look at the brands getting recognition and love in the US this year. One of my favourite CMOs, Dom, has just joined Abnormal AI, and he's essentially a creative director CMO. He's all about bringing creativity to the business. Liquid Death is another. What they've built with a creative team of about five people is phenomenal. That really is their marketing function.

The way Dom talks about it, he sees his role as creating a conversation about the brand, not the product, and creating genuine love and interest. At his last company, instead of the typical B2B brand partnership with the PGA Tour, they partnered with monster trucks and had Grave Digger at RSA this year. He talks very openly about not being a data-driven marketer. He's an insight-driven one.

I'd be fascinated to see if we get that shift in the next 12 months. The big CMOs have mostly come from MBA backgrounds and the corporate world. They can talk the corporate speak, and they're very data-driven and analytically driven. I'll eat my hat if in 12 months all the new CMOs are ex-chief creative officers from Wieden+Kennedy. But you're right, true creativity is something AI is going to take a long time to replace, if ever.

Rich: Liquid Death is a B2C brand. Do you feel any B2B firms or B2B CMOs are starting to get a bit braver with their creativity? We've always looked at B2C with green eyes, at the cool stuff they get to do because the budgets are bigger and the messages a little simpler. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Is B2B starting to scratch that itch?

David: I think so. I've seen much braver work this year. Cohesity, a client I used to work with, built their whole brand campaign this year around a goat. A real-life goat, as in the GOAT, the greatest of all time. They've literally got a goat in all of their ads. All of their commercials are AI generated, but they've done a half decent job, and it's brave and it's different. I don't know if it's impacting their share price yet. Commvault continue to be pretty brave with the work they put out too.

From our own experience, we're really pushing to do braver work with clients, but it still comes down to finding executive leadership that will truly buy into it. Great clients get great work. That adage is still very much true. We've pitched some really big, bold, provocative B2C-style campaigns this year that would work, that the marketing team was excited about, and the board passed. There's more of that tension in B2B than in B2C, but it is wavering.

That's why the lower mid-market is a much more interesting place to play at the minute. Often there are much younger founders who've grown up in the age of creativity and digital. They recognise they're in highly commoditised markets where a million other companies are doing very similar things, and if they want a chance of standing out, they need to be different. Whenever we pitch new clients, we try to make sure we meet the CEO or founder so we can gauge their risk tolerance, more so than just meeting the CMO. Ultimately, who's buying the work if you're doing big creative?

Rich: Most marketing teams and CMOs would love to try something really different, really fresh. As you say, the challenge is getting the support from the service line heads or the CEO to say, yes, let's go for it.

David: I've thought a lot about this over the past five years. We went through the cycle of B2B agencies selling themselves as the right partner because they understand the very different buying dynamics. Then came the wave of B2C agencies realising there's a tonne of money in B2B and launching their B2B wings, which aren't really true B2B. Now I think we may see another swing with this creativity phase. I've heard directly from clients that they're starting to seek out B2C agencies, because they feel that's what it takes to get the big, bold creative they're looking for.

That's why we've been really intentional at Unbound about hiring people from a variety of backgrounds, client side and B2C. Lee Wardell, our Chief Creative Officer, comes from a really diverse B2C and B2B background. The shape of these teams is changing in service of doing the best work.

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Rich: The job market is extremely hard for marketers right now, to the point that we built a job site just to help marketers find jobs that aren't advertised on LinkedIn. It's almost like the housing market. If people are scared about how negative the job market is while the price of everything goes through the roof, they're more reluctant to move. If they don't move, there's no gap for someone else and the whole thing grinds to a halt. Do you feel that fear? Is it impacting decisions? Are people taking fewer risks?

David: The chain stalls. It's a good way to frame it. I definitely feel it and see it, particularly living in Seattle, such a big tech market. I know lots of very talented friends who are out of work and never expected to be at any point in their career. Marketing in particular is feeling it.

There are a lot of frightened clients feeling insecure about their position. Less at CMO level, where there's a little more protection at the moment, but the VP level is a really tough market. If you're a VP of corporate marketing and you're out of a job, it's a real struggle to find a similar gig anywhere near the compensation you're looking for. That tier is struggling to know what to do. Go to a smaller company and try to get a CMO job? Accept being an individual contributor at a bigger enterprise?

I don't know if there's a secret recipe. But the AI-forward CMOs, the people really leaning into AI, are outperforming and creating job stability for themselves. I've also seen a few people put themselves out of a job because they got so good at AI that they built the tooling and automated their own role.

One of my friends and clients is a great example. At the start of last year she went from agency side to a mid-level in-house role reporting to the CMO. They downsized the team, and she doubled down on building a whole agentic team around her, with an analyst, a go to market agent and more. It got enough notice in the company that they fired the CMO and offered her the head of marketing position, even though she'd only been in role about a year. They thought she could do the job at a fraction of the price of the last CMO. She said she wasn't comfortable with that, left a month or two later, and has been consulting ever since.

It's a bizarre time. But if you can show a leadership team that you can build an agentic team around you, you're worth your weight in gold.

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Rich: Put your Nostradamus hat on and look a year ahead, because any further than that I'm not sure anyone can predict. What's going to happen in 2027 that impacts marketers?

David: I think we'll keep seeing teams cut down to core individual leaders per function, with an expectation that they create agentic teams around them. I completely agree with you that we're going to see a push for creativity in B2B. Bolder moves from brands. Media budgets going up pretty significantly.

At the same time, the optimist in me hopes we see cycles of companies hiring talent back because they've realised they cut too deep and need people to actually do the work. A bit of a backlash against over-indexing on AI automation.

My other hope is that it forces more alignment between marketing and sales. Those two teams are going to become more aligned. I know you spend a lot of time with chief growth officers. I think that role becomes even more popular.

Rich: I'm definitely seeing it. I've had more chats with chief growth officers this year than I've ever had. It used to be chief sales officers and chief revenue officers. This year it's chief growth officers. CMOs are having to adapt with it, because if they don't, their job becomes a smaller cog in a much bigger machine. I've seen marketers take more interest than ever in product development and customer interaction. Even if it's not account management, it's client satisfaction. That can only be a good thing for marketers, because you get more context.

If we're optimistic, we might draw parallels with outsourcing 20 or 30 years ago. There was a big wave of, yep, outsourcing is the next big thing, everyone's doing it. Over the following years people retreated a bit and realised they'd outsourced too much, and that a blended model would suit them better. The glass half full part of me hopes that's what happens with AI. We've used it too much, we need guardrails, it can't yet replace the opinions and judgement of a human, let's roll it back. Fingers firmly crossed.

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Rich: Have you seen any AI tools recently that you think are absolutely fantastic? Any you're vocal about?

David: Honestly, no. That's my genuinely honest answer.

Rich: Nothing's wowed you?

David: No. Whenever you peel back the layers... Sure, from a creativity perspective the tooling keeps getting better and better. But there's still not one tool to rule them all. All of the creatives I admire, at Unbound and in my network, are using a whole host of different tools. I couldn't even name them, they're changing that rapidly.

It is getting pretty incredible what people are able to accomplish. There's a lot of tooling springing up around specific areas like ABM, a lot of it self-serve. But candidly, when you really get down to it, clients are using Claude, ChatGPT and Cowork. That's what's running the majority of corporate America at the moment.

Rich: That's quite scary.

David: It is.

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Rich: What's your view on all things LinkedIn, the social media of choice?

David: When I put my 12 month hat on, it's hard to see LinkedIn not changing a bunch. It's still the B2B platform of choice for reaching your audiences through campaigns, but it's getting so expensive that lots of clients are cutting back big time and putting more into Meta.

The clash of consumer and business on LinkedIn has been both a good and a bad thing. It feels more like a personal social platform now than the pure play business network it was. You get the recommended influencers popping up who might as well be your Instagram feed. There aren't that many good-looking influencers in the world, and they all get surfaced at the same time. It's hard not to feel LinkedIn needs to look at creating sub applications, because it's so noisy. Jobs, content, thought leadership, let alone general dialogue, all in one place.

Rich: I think it's in dire trouble. I see a swarm of AI slop. There's a big difference in readability and value between AI writing the first draft and AI tweaking your draft. I worry a lot about marketing spend on LinkedIn because it's so opaque and the analytics aren't very good. There's also a big question mark over whether you're genuinely reaching those profiles, and whether they're actually real people. And to your point, there's a bit of gaming of the system, with posts you'd traditionally see on Instagram or Facebook appearing on LinkedIn. That's not what it's historically been there for. But it lacks a competitor at this moment in time. Maybe someone's going to build one, maybe someone's already built it and it's ready. At the moment I'd struggle to recommend anyone spends any money advertising on the site.

David: I agree. I watched a fascinating talk the other week from the CMO of Temporal, a company I'm talking to at the moment. They're heavily indexing into social media outside of LinkedIn: TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. They've essentially been contracting sketch artists and influencers to write content for them. They're building their marketing presence by entertaining their audience, as opposed to trying to get them to download an ebook.

Maybe it's all linked to the consumerisation of B2B. People are saying, I do want to understand your point of view, but I'm not going to read a 50 page report, and I'm not going to give you my details just to get hold of a white paper.

Rich: You touched on influencers there, which is another area where B2B has been slow off the starting blocks compared to B2C. Part of what's driving it is that platforms like LinkedIn aren't satisfying people. There's a big push for people to invest in building their own brand and their own audiences, and the profiles of individual execs, because the traditional things they did at a company level just aren't working. So maybe that's another prediction. Are we going to see the rise of the B2B influencer? We can name a couple, but nothing on the scale of B2C.

David: 100%. A great example is our work with Capital One. They intentionally hired a fabulous guy called Rudy Chetty, who was at AWS before he joined and had already built a social following of 120,000. He's joined Capital One Software as their field CTO. We do monthly video shoots with Rudy, around ten videos a month, everything from 30 second to 90 second shorts. He makes very complex technology approachable, but it's technically accurate, so it works for technical audiences too. That's one of our primary awareness channels. At the moment they're being posted on LinkedIn, because Capital One is being more conservative.

The reason it works with Rudy is that he's very experienced at being his own brand, writing his content and shooting it. Everyone's asking how you turn your people into influencers. It's OK for them not to all be that. Not everyone is going to hire a Bill McDermott as CEO who's a fantastic spokesperson for the company. But we might see a lot more companies hiring a front of house, owned influencer, as opposed to renting from a community of influencers.

Rich: Or it increases the price of the people in the industry who can do that stuff. Every B2B firm up and down the land has subject matter experts, but some of them are not media ready and never will be. So either the price goes up for the ones who are, or they outsource it.

David: Buying talent in a different way.

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Rich: Closer to home, who's your ideal client? What's your sweet spot, what do they look like and what do they ask you for?

David: Let's say a $500 million fast growth scale up, right in the middle. They've just had a funding round, or a new CMO has come in. We're really good at helping companies who have been successful getting to that first big milestone but need help getting to the next. That's often moving into a new category, or moving from a point solution to a platform, and they need help telling a much more enterprise level story to the market and their customers. I feel very confident every time in our storytelling capabilities, being a great thought partner and creative partner to help these organisations elevate their narrative.

The second piece is pipeline. Because we've got the demand gen offering and our own owned and operated database, we can help companies that are growing quickly move really fast. With Acronis earlier this year, from kicking off the brand work to getting a campaign into market took three months, and we started seeing new leads and closed pipeline within a quarter of launch.

SaaS and cybersecurity are the two key areas where our team has great domain expertise. The US is still where the majority of our new creative work comes from. We support Freshworks' demand generation with their teams in India, and we work directly with a few companies across the US and the UK, Rubrik being one of them. In the UK, we're trying to create some fame around our solution offerings, and I think ABM is going to be a really good place to keep focusing.

Rich: If UK B2B marketers love anything, it's ABM. It's actually what I used to do. I set up BT Global Services' first ever ABM programme, although we called it key account marketing. Treating your top clients like a market in their own right. The best do events a little differently too, like B2B Marketing United. I can't stand stale corporate events.

David: I'm a huge advocate of that. It's part of what we've been trying to do at Unbound, living our company values and being a little bit non-traditional about things. One of my personal hobbies is DJing, so I'll find any excuse. I've actually been looking at launching Unbound Radio.

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David Hayes is EVP, GTM Solutions at Unbound IA, based in Seattle. He joined Unbound in 2025 after 20 years agency side, including The Marketing Practice and POP, working with brands including AWS, Adobe, Intel and Nutanix.